Lesson six: I’m out of my depth

I’ve found myself out of my depth a lot this week.

The poor pooches haven’t been fairing well in this heat and with my husband away I haven’t been able to coordinate an early morning walk for a few days. So this morning when I saw some cloud cover I got us all out of the house to stretch our legs before the sun came in full force.

With no hats, suncream or water it probably wasn’t the day for adventuring but I knew about a different route to normal so thought I’d give it a whirl. Two stagnant knee high pools, two fly overs, two meadows, one endless country road and three hours later we were home. But, we didn’t meet another soul and it was beautiful, maybe not when Poo Monster found a ‘mature’ carcass to roll in, but other bits.

The thing about a walk is I know I’ll get home at some point, there’s an end in sight. It’s not that simple with raising people and the Mini Dictator (MD) has become quite a challenge. The littlest soul has started crawling which might have added to her frustrations but more than once I found myself feeling completely clueless with no concept of how or when it would end. A panic call to my sister, some helpful advice from a Facebook group of likeminded parents and a few orders from the Desperate Parent subscription (or Amazon Prime to the carefree none-parents out there) and I’m feeling a lot more positive about a way forward. I can’t help but feel sometimes that my first born is a trial run and I worry about how much I will get it wrong.

With my second baby I’m pretty confident in what I’m doing but with the MD it’s all a learning curve. I wouldn’t expect to do anything else perfect the first time so why should I expect parenting to be any different? This is something I need to keep in mind when I find myself being hard on my husband. He’s at work so doesn’t get the practice with them all day and I’m yet to find the instruction manual for these things we created.

So tomorrow my big girl pants will go back on, I’ve got a plan and an end in sight. Plus these children will be picking my care home so I can’t mess them up too much.